


Knight of Pentacles, King of Wands

by paratrooper-sam (BernardStark)



Series: Tarot 'verse [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (Temporary) Major Character Death, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe – Fusion, Alternate Universe – Hogwarts, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Magic, Stan Lee Cameo, because it's harry potter, blood status slurs, but are you really going to complain about Irish-accented Steve and Bucky, they are from Dublin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:30:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8008120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BernardStark/pseuds/paratrooper-sam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Steve steps up to Mr. Strange's desk still shaken and preoccupied, barely looking at the wand as he waves it, but by the time he’s gone through seventeen and none have let out so much as a whistle, he starts to panic. Bucky has shuffled closer with every failed attempt, and now he’s so close Steve can hear him holding his breath.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Steve breathes for him. He swishes the wand.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Nothing happens.</i>
</p><p>Steve Rogers is a good man. He's just not a very good wizard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be an SBBB fic, but life got in the way, as it often does. Thanks go out to my lovely artist [picoalloe](http://picoalloe.tumblr.com/), whose art rocks my socks, seriously guys it's amazing, click on the link and go check out her tumblr. My sister was the beta for this story, as per usual, and we're both dyslexic so any mistakes are the fault of bad luck and biology. That being said, feel free to point out anything you see, I love it when you guys do my work for me. The inspiration for this story came about while my sister and I were sitting on her bed trying to Sort Steve, and I decided he would be a Gryffindor, but also probably a squib.
> 
> This story starts when Steve and Bucky are eleven, so expect the slowest of slow builds, and though the rating is subject to change I don't really do explicit sex. So if that's what you're looking for, you'll find tons of awesome stuff elsewhere on the archive. I highly encourage you to check out the Big Bang collection.
> 
> I may add more tags as the story progresses. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

It is summer in Dublin and they are seven years old. They’re out on Bucky’s tiny balcony in nothing but their short trousers and braces, trying to see who can spit farther, leaning out over the railing with their feet on the lower rung. The black paint on the balcony is old and peeling, and it flakes off under their hands.

Steve’s two front teeth are missing, and he’s mostly used to the gap in his smile now, big enough to poke his tongue through. Bucky’s front teeth are more than halfway grown in. Steve tries to pretend he’s not jealous, and Bucky lets him.

The sun is low enough now to put Steve and Bucky in the shade of the tenement building. They watch Bucky’s spit as it falls down into the alley below, trying to track where it lands.

Bucky props his elbows on the rail and says, “Your turn.” It’s that time of day where afternoon tilts over into evening, all dizzy golden light and the slow-growing shadows of buildings. The streets smell of exhaust fumes and bread from the bakery down the way. Steve lets the spit gather in his mouth. Then he throws himself forward and lets it fly.

Steve wins the game, his spit going far enough to hit the wall of the neighboring tenement. It sticks there, a small white spot against the brick.

The way the phlegm clogs up his throat makes good ammunition, and Steve’s always been better at spitting. You don’t have to be big and strong, you just have to mean it. Steve always means it.

He suspects that’s the reason they play this game so often, but he doesn’t mind. He likes being able to win and knowing Bucky didn’t let him.

Their mothers’ voices filter out through the window, the words unclear but the cadence familiar, and the summer air is warm on their cheeks. Steve grins over at Bucky and pokes his tongue through the gap in his teeth.

Bucky pretends to scowl back. “All right, all right, you win. Don’t gimme that look,” he says, and pushes Steve’s shoulder.

He doesn’t mean to. They’re just clowning. But Steve is still tipped forward from spitting, and the paint is peeling off the bottom rung of the railing under his bare toes. When his foot slips, he falls.

It seems all wrong, turned around in his head, like the ground is rushing up toward him instead of the other way around. Late August heat warps the air over the cobbles until everything seems to shimmer and sway, dreamlike. He thinks as he falls, _My teeth haven’t even grown in yet._

And then all of a sudden he _stops_. In midair, halfway between the ground and the balcony, where Bucky’s still leaning above him. Steve can see his eyes. They’re clear grey and very wide. His hand is out, fingers splayed, reaching down toward Steve.

And Steve _knows_ , deep in his bones. This isn’t his magic. It’s Bucky’s.

***

“It wasn’t my magic,” Steve says. _It’s yours,_ he doesn’t say.

He doesn’t need to.

They’re walking home from another back alley scuffle with blood on their knuckles. Steve is holding his sleeve to his nose to slow the bleeding, and Bucky glances over every once in a while, brows heavy with disapproval, trying to pretend he isn’t worried. It’s not raining yet, but the clouds are stooped low, peering down with dark faces, and the smell of it blows in on the wind.

The boy who tried to put his fist through Steve’s face had him backed up against the wall when Bucky found them. Steve’s skull and elbows clattered against the bricks every time the boy threw a punch. He was a head taller than Steve and nearly twice as wide, big enough that Steve couldn't see Bucky past his bulk until Bucky hauled the boy off by the collar, threw Steve a smile full of teeth, and punched the boy in the face.

The boy drew his fist to punch Bucky back, and Steve blinked. When he opened his eyes, the boy was hanging off the top of the lamppost and Bucky had taken off running, dragging Steve along by the elbow.

This is how it always goes. Steve wading into trouble and Bucky diving in to fish him out.

Steve’s mouth tastes like pennies, and the blood is dripping thick down the back of his throat to join the phlegm that never really goes away.

It’s always hard for Steve to breathe, but the blood makes it harder, filling up his nose and throat until he’s choking on it. His nose is throbbing. The fabric around it blooms red and his face around it blooms blue, like some exotic flower unfurling both ways. “Ma’s goin’a kill me,” he says.

Bucky doesn’t argue. Steve knew he wouldn’t. “Bit late to be worryin’ about that.”

Steve shrugs and tries not to jostle the wrist that’s pressed to his face. He’s limping a bit from a kick to the shin, trying not to stumble over loose cobbles he can’t see around his own hand, and Bucky catches his elbow sometimes to steady him. One of his grey stockings is sliding down his leg, but he doesn’t bother pulling it up.

It’s almost noon, the sun straight above shining weakly through the ever-present clouds rolling in up the River Liffey, and his ma won’t be pleased when he shuffles in bleeding and disheveled with his head hung low. Fixing his stocking won’t make much difference. His dinner is going to taste like blood.

“You’re a right bloody mess,” Bucky tells him, and Steve scowls, though he knows Bucky can’t see it with Steve’s unbuttoned cuff hanging down over his mouth. The button popped off somewhere between Steve landing a hit on the boy’s jaw and the boy throwing him up against the wall. It’s still on the ground in the alleyway, a small flat circle of tin, lost somewhere in the cracks between the cobbles. Impossible to find without magic, even if they could afford to go back for it.

Ma won’t be able to mend a button she doesn’t have, and they have nothing to Transfigure into a new one.

Steve’s stocking is down around his ankle now. His nose is still bleeding, the blood warm on his face where it’s dripping down into his mouth, on his wrist where it’s soaking into his shirtsleeve. The stains will probably never come out.

Bucky offered to try and fix his nose, but Steve wouldn’t let him.

Bucky’s the best with magic on their row of crooked tenements, at least amongst the children who haven’t been to school yet. Most of the others only manage magic accidentally, in moments of anger or desperation, but Bucky can sometimes get it to do what he wants, if he wants it bad enough. Steve tries, but he still isn’t sure how not to be envious of it.

June is drawing to a close, curling hot around the city, not quite ready to let go. Steve will be eleven in less than two weeks, and he still hasn’t shown any trace of magic at all.

The worst part is that Steve’s pretty sure Bucky could fix his nose if Steve let him. That Bucky wants to take away Steve’s pain so intensely he’d manage it. That he hates to see Steve bleed so much he could wash it away just by wishing.

The envy chokes him, worse than the blood and the phlegm in his throat. He doesn’t want it.

The next time Bucky reaches out to steady him, Steve reaches out too, knocking their elbows together. Bucky looks as though he wants to keep scowling, but he smiles at Steve instead, like he can’t help it. “You’re a menace, Steve Rogers,” he says. Steve smiles back.

“What’d he do, anyway?” Bucky asks as they pass the bakery on the corner of their street. Bucky is walking backwards so they can talk face-to-face, and Steve can see Mrs. Callahan moving in the kitchen through the wide front windows of the bakery. She’s making something with cinnamon and honey, and the warm sweet smell of it spills out into the street, strong enough to break through the smell of blood in his nose.

“He was practicing magic on Mr. Cagney’s dog. Trying to get rocks to jump up and hit her.”

Bucky is still walking backwards, always a few steps ahead. He’s giving Steve a strange look.

Steve wants to cross his arms, but one of them is still pressed against his face. He settles for hunching his shoulders a little. “He had her tied up to the front steps like usual. She couldn’t get away. I couldn’t just walk on by.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I know.”

Steve looks away. The clouds are growing darker and darker overhead, slowly blotting out the sun. Bucky has to turn around to catch the door at the front of their building.

Steve’s ma is setting a pot to boil at the stove when he comes in, wheezing a little from four flights of stairs, and she sighs when she sees him. She closes her eyes for a moment, pushing her hair back, away from her forehead.

When she opens them, her eyes look tired. The blood sits heavy in Steve’s stomach. “Come and set the table, then,” his mother says.

The table is small and rickety, Transfigured from a wooden crate, repaired so many times the Charms no longer stick. He sets it with his head bowed, laying out their bent tin forks, their two yellowing bowls, and sneaking glances at his mother from the corner of his eye.

She joins him at the table for a quiet dinner that tastes like copper, and every once in a while she reaches up to rub a hand over her eyes or her cheek and sigh. Each time, Steve feels like he’s run all the way up from the ground floor, chest tight, throat aching.

She doesn’t take out her wand to fix his nose until they’ve both finished eating. The cartilage snaps back into place with a crack of sound and pain, but the taste of blood lingers in his mouth.

“Thanks, Ma,” he says quietly.

His mother doesn’t answer. Her mouth twists to one side and she waves her wand over the sleeve of his shirt, whispering “ _Tergeo,_ ” several times, until all the fresh blood has been siphoned away. A dark, wine-colored stain still spans the length of his forearm. “The rest is set,” she says. “There’s no hope for the shirt.”

She lets go of his arm, looks up at him and sighs.

As she repeats the incantation over the blood drying thick on his face, she says, “Steven. I wish you wouldn’t.”

Steve fidgets with his sleeve, rubbing it as though he can rub the stain right out. He looks down at his shoes, at the slight hole in the toe where the repair Charms are growing thin again. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

His mother huffs a tired laugh. “Doesn’t matter how sorry you are if you’re just going to go off and do it again tomorrow.”

Steve scrunches his nose and his mother smiles. Her hand lands on the top of his head, and he watches as she waves her wand to start the dishes washing themselves.

***

They’re out by the docks when it happens, collecting flat chunks of concrete and trying to skim them across the River Liffey. Steve convinces Bucky to stand up on the balustrade so it doesn’t get in their way, but from there the rocks hit the water at an angle, and they sink straight away.

The rail is made of cement, sturdy and wide. Bucky’s better at balancing than Steve but he doesn’t say anything, not even when Steve has to crouch down to keep from slipping into the river. Bucky watches Steve with worried eyes, hand poised to reach out, until he rights himself again.

“I’ll come back for the summers,” Bucky is saying. “And when I’m an Auror, I’ll come back for you.” He throws another rock and watches it drop. Steve can tell he wants to use his magic to make it skip, but Steve knows he won’t. Not while Steve’s stones keep sinking.

Steve scowls. He throws his next rock hard, straight down into the water, and doesn’t bother trying to keep it flat.

It hits the water. It hits the water again. It sinks.

Bucky nearly falls off the rail.

“DID YOU SEE THAT?” Bucky shouts, staring at Steve, his hands braced on the balustrade.

Steve glances between Bucky and the spot on the water where his rock disappeared, head turning so fast he feels dizzy. Bucky had turned toward Steve so quick he’d lost his balance and fallen into a crouch to keep from tipping over. For once, he’s the one looking up at Steve. Looking down at him, Steve feels like the whole world has tipped on its axis, like he’s flying, or falling. Sunlight glints off the water.

“It skipped,” Bucky says, and shoves himself to his feet. He grabs Steve by both shoulders. “IT SKIPPED.” He shakes Steve a little, and they almost pitch over the side of the railing, the both of them, their pockets still heavy, filled up with stones. He’s grinning like a fool.

His grin breaks when he realizes Steve’s not smiling back.

“That… was that… That was you, Steve.” He searches Steve’s face. “Wasn’t it?”

Steve shakes his head and whispers, “I don’t know.” They both turn to look at the water below, the ripples washed away and the stone sunk out of sight.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve gets a letter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came out faster than expected, usually chapters are going to take a little more time. Thanks to my sister again for the beta. Warning for Doctor Strange, that guy is a dick.

When the owl comes, Ma stares out the open window and watches it approach over the jagged line of tenement rooftops, one hand up to shade her eyes.

Last summer an owl came, too, with a letter from the Ministry in its beak. That week had been the hottest in recent memory, too hot to leave the windows closed, and a Muggle woman across the way caught Steve’s ma spelling his trousers clean through the open window. The owl had come, and Ma took the letter and stared at it with her hand over her mouth. She stood there like that for a long time, and afterward she’d taken her wand and hid it under a floorboard beneath the bed, where Steve wasn’t allowed to look. Now every time she does magic, she locks the window.

The owl is getting closer, swooping low over the rooftops, and Ma’s hand is raised to block the afternoon sun. It’s shaking against her brow.

Steve crosses the room and grabs onto the hem of her shirt, pressing his face against her side. She lays her hand on his head. She’s gotten two of these letters before, once in the mud of a battlefield in France, elbow-deep in a stranger’s blood three days after her husband died, and once at this very window where they’re standing together now. Steve knows what happens when you break the Statute of Secrecy too many times. Ma had sat him down and told him after that second letter, how they snap your wand and lock you away. He glances over at the floor under the bed and hopes his ma doesn’t realize he’s doing it.

They’re still standing like that when the owl lands on the windowsill. Ma takes a deep breath that only shakes a little, and reaches out to take the letter from its beak.

When she sees the seal, she gasps out loud and drops the letter. Her hand is on her mouth again, and above it her eyes are wide. The letter flutters to the floor.

Steve bends down to pick it up.

***

Steve scrambles up to the tenement roof, trying not to crumple up the letter clutched in his hand. They’re not supposed to play up here, but he knows Bucky’s waiting for him, as he always does in the evening after tea. It’s not really a secret hideout, since Bucky’s da and some of the other men come up here at night to smoke and talk somewhere they won’t wake the children, but in the daytime it’s just for the two of them.

“Bucky,” Steve says when he sees him, slipping a little on the shingles as he half-walks, half-skids down the slope of the roof. Bucky’s sitting right on the edge with his feet hanging off, laughing a little at Steve, but he stops abruptly when he sees Steve’s face. Steve plops down and shoves the letter at him.

Bucky looks down at the folded letter and flips it open to read the green writing on the front. He looks back up so quickly he slips down the roof a little. “Steve,” he says, and stares at Steve with wide eyes.

Steve nods. He’s scrubbing his sleeve over his wet face, but Bucky pretends not to notice.

“ _Mer_ lin,” says Bucky. He looks at the letter, then at Steve, then down at the letter again. And then he grins, bigger than Steve’s ever seen him grin before. “This is _brilliant_.”

He lunges at Steve and hugs him so hard Steve has to push him away before he rolls them both right off the edge of the roof.

“We’re going to Hogwarts!”

The letter is still in Bucky’s hand, crushed now. Steve glares at him, takes it back with careful hands, and smoothes it out against his knee. “Books, cauldron, wand,” he reads off. “ _Dragon hide gloves._ I dunno how we’ll afford all this. We’re skint.”

Bucky shrugs and swings his legs. “Right now, everyone is. But really the only thing you need new is your wand. That’s what my da says, anyway.”

Steve is staring down at the list forlornly. “We don’t have enough money for new _shoes_.”

“Well,” says Bucky, “I s’pose there’s only one thing for it.”

Steve looks over at him. “Yeah? What’s that, then?”

Grinning, Bucky bumps their shoulders together. “You’ll have to turn to a life of crime.”

Steve laughs and pushes him away.

That doesn’t stop Bucky. He’s really going now, hands up like he’s putting their names in lights. “Bucky and Steve, outlaws! Wizards at large! Approach with extreme caution.” He kicks at Steve’s ankle. “There’ll be a thousand galleon bounty on our heads.”

Steve laughs again and rolls his eyes. He kicks Bucky back. “I thought you wanted to be an Auror.”

“And let you have all the fun? Not a chance. Face it, mate. You’re stuck with me.”

“Isn’t it awful? I bet you’ll die doing something annoyingly grand and glorious, then come back as a ghost just to bother me some more.”

“That does sound like me,” says Bucky happily.

The sun is shining down on the shingles and the washing, and the air up here smells like laundry and hot tar. Looking out over the city, it seems full of possibilities, a web of clotheslines strung up between the rooftops like each one could lead anywhere.

They stay up on the roof until Bucky’s ma sticks her head out the window to yell them back down.

***

Bucky and Steve, and Steve’s mother and Bucky’s whole family—even his da, who is a drunk and usually stays home, with a bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other—and Benji from down the road, and four girls they don’t know from the other side of the city all take a Portkey to Diagon Alley together. It’s an enchanted bottle cap, and it barely fits everyone’s finger. One of the girls has to crouch on the ground at the center of their group and press her finger to the bottom. Steve thinks they must look a sight, popping up on the street outside Gringotts out of thin air, all gathered around the cap of a cola bottle with the tallest girl on the ground in the middle.

No one looks twice at them.

Steve spins in a slow circle, looking around at the shop fronts and the street performers and the women in tall pointed hats. The paint on the storefronts is green and purple and not peeling, and there are things in the shop window displays worth more than Steve’s life. Racing brooms from the top of the line, clothes in fine silks and satins, solid gold cauldrons and diamond vials. Even the cobbles are clean and smooth under their feet. He’s never seen so much color, so much beauty, so much magic, so much… wealth.

A whole world the Hard Times haven’t touched.

Bucky tugs him along down the street, trailing after their families while one girl from the other side of the city goes straight into Gringotts, because she has a vault. Because she has something to put in it.

When they get to Strange’s wand shop, it’s dim and quiet, and though the room isn’t small, there’s very little standing room. All the space is taken up by a huge desk, some spindly-legged chairs by the window, and rows upon rows of shelves stuffed haphazardly with boxed wands. It’s only Bucky and Steve and their families now, the others peeling off along the way to find robes and cauldrons and books.

Steve can hear the money jingling in his mother’s pocket. Seven Galleons. He tries not to calculate how many months’ salary that is.

They all startle when Mr. Strange appears from behind the stacks like he’s stepping out of the fog. He’s younger than Steve expected, with dark hair and a neat goatee, a round clasp gleaming gold at the throat of his robes with a circle of strange runes engraved around its circumference. He looks at them with wide pale eyes, like the fog’s inside him, too, his eyes windows or mirrors or crystal balls, all clouded up so you can’t see. Steve doesn’t see Mr. Strange blink at all as he introduces himself and greets Bucky’s parents, not by name but by wand.

“Yew, twelve and a half inches, dragon heartstring,” he says, staring straight at Bucky’s mother with those pale, unblinking eyes. “Extremely bendy. Good for charms. And,” he turns those eyes on Bucky’s father, “Hawthorn, ten inches, unicorn hair. Slightly supple, best handled with care.”

He turns to face Bucky. “And what will you be?”

He doesn’t speak to Ma at all. Steve knows her wand was a family heirloom, passed down by a mother who hasn’t spoken to her since before Steve was born. It’s a beautiful wand, exquisitely crafted, older than Steve and his mother and her mother, too, older than anything Steve’s ever touched. When Steve held it once it felt achingly sad, just from the weight in his hand.

Bucky goes first, Strange passing him wand after wand with a steady hand and a steadier gaze, those eyes like crystal balls only he can see into, solemn as though holding Bucky’s future in his hands. Everything Bucky will do, all he will be. How he will die. Steve can feel his hands shaking, a little.

Steve knows the instant Bucky’s hand touches the seventh wand that it’s his. There’s a surge in his blood, a restless shifting just under his skin, and all the little hairs on his arms stand straight up like sentinels, waiting. There’s a bone-deep knowledge like a breath against his ear, a whisper through his skull of _this is the one._ Bucky himself doesn’t seem to notice anything until he gives it a wave and music fills the air, the first strains of a song Bucky made up four years ago, humming and dancing around Steve on the walk home from school. Steve doesn’t know what any of it means.

Bucky hands over his seven Galleons.

Steve steps up to the desk still shaken and preoccupied, barely looking at the wand as he waves it, but by the time he’s gone through seventeen and none have let out so much as a whistle, he starts to panic. Mr. Strange is staring straight at him, impassive, eyes steady and opaque like judgment. He can feel everyone’s gaze on him, Bucky’s and Ma’s, Bucky’s parents’ and all of Bucky’s sisters’. They’re standing all around him, watching him, waiting for something to happen, for some kind of sign.

He’s waiting, too.

Mr. Strange hands Steve the eighteenth wand, and he closes his eyes. Bucky has shuffled closer with every failed attempt, and now he’s so close Steve can hear him holding his breath.

Steve breathes for him. He swishes the wand.

Nothing happens.

Bucky’s breathing again beside him, but it’s heavy and a little short, and it matches the dull thump of dread in Steve’s chest. Steve doesn’t turn to look.

When Strange hands Steve the nineteenth wand, he can feel Bucky watching him, eyes clear gray and very wide. Steve meets his gaze for a moment, takes a shaky breath. He looks back at his mother. He thinks about the look on her face when she takes the wand out from beneath the floorboard under her bed. He thinks about Bucky’s smile when he uses his magic to tug on his sisters’ hair, to make them laugh. He thinks of the feeling he got, halfway between flying and falling as he stood on that old concrete balustrade, the river rushing down below as the stone hit it once, and then once more.

The wand in his hand glows white at the tip. Just barely, but it’s there.

Bucky hugs Steve so hard he almost tackles him. When Steve looks back at his mother, she’s grinning, her eyes brighter than he’s ever seen them, even with a wand in her hand.

***

Bucky’s family has a lot more money than Steve’s, all told, but they don’t have much more money per person. There’s six of them, and Bucky’s da is a drunk. He’s not a violent drunk or an absent drunk, he’s just an ordinary drunk living his own private tragedy of wasted potential, bitter as the liquor he drinks and mourning all the people he could have been, like most people’s fathers they know.

Bucky says all fathers are disappointments. Either they die young, they walk out, or they hang around long enough to break your heart.

Bucky is very dramatic.

Steve doesn’t think Buck’s being fair, and it makes him burn in defense of his own father who died in the war, who died a hero. But it makes Bucky feel better about his old man, who is a drunk, so Steve doesn’t say anything.

If he goes to work drunk no one really cares. Bucky’s father is an undertaker like his father before him, so mostly he uses his magic to dig holes and fill them back up. But in between he lowers the bodies of witches and wizards down into the ground to rejoin the thrumming magic of the earth, of the moonstone and saltpeter and antimony mixed in with the ordinary stone of the bedrock, and sets wards to protect against theft and forgetting.

Bucky doesn’t want to be an undertaker. Steve doesn’t think it sounds so bad, really. Protector of the dead. At lease he’s protecting _someone_. Steve can’t even protect himself. And Bucky’s da gets to do _magic._

Bucky is always angry at his father, but he seems to have forgiven him for a while, or at least forgotten about it, because his da stayed in Diagon Alley the day they got their wands, when Steve and Steve’s Ma the rest of Bucky’s family went home on the Portkey. Bucky’s da Apparated home later, by himself, with an owl cage under his arm and a big, solemn brown barn owl inside it.

Steve wasn’t there to see it because Buck’s ma didn’t want to make him feel bad. Steve and his ma barely had enough to pay for the wand.

Steve would have liked to be there anyway, just for the look on Bucky’s face.

Now, four days later, Bucky’s shut up with the owl in the cramped little room he shares with his sisters. He didn’t invite Steve, because his ma still thinks it’ll make Steve feel bad, and Bucky’s a good boy who listens to his ma, who doesn’t pick fights on purpose, who doesn’t leave her to fix his busted nose and sit worried at the window every time he’s out the door.

Steve knows Bucky does it to make up for his da, to prove he’s not like him. To save his mother from another Barnes boy who looks for the man he could have been in the bottom of a bottle. Steve tries not to think about it. He doesn’t like what it says about him, that he keeps coming home to his ma covered in blood when the last time she saw his da he was dead and she had his blood up to her elbows.

Steve is walking down the street alone, with his hands in his pockets, kicking a stone like he needs something to follow. Sometimes when Bucky’s not around he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he tools around town looking for trouble. But he doesn’t want any trouble right now, because Ma’s tired face is still in his mind and the guilt comes in cold, sick waves that bank the fire in his gut, the furious knowledge of injustice that’s happening right now, the burning need to stop it.

But Steve gets into trouble even when he doesn’t want it.

He hears a scratchy little cry when he passes an alleyway down the street from the cinema, and at first he thinks it’s two alley cats scrapping over some half-eaten bag of popcorn or bit of sausage. Then he hears a mean laugh, and the same cat hissing again.

He goes down the alley.

The boy’s much bigger than Steve, and bigger than most of the kids Steve fights. He’s maybe thirteen or fourteen, but he’s got a broken bottle in his hand and a loud little orange rag cornered between a trashcan and a brick wall.

The boy darts forward and the kitten dodges the bottle, screeching again, a high, vicious sound. It’s a tiny thing, long as maybe one and a half of Steve’s hands and scrawny, like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a dirty orange-and-white dishtowel. It’s spitting mad and mean with it. Steve thinks it’s cute as anything.

“Oi!” says Steve, and the boy looks up. “Quit it!”

The boy turns the bottle on Steve.

The alley is so narrow Steve could stand in the middle and touch one of the walls with each hand. He darts out of the way, but his elbow catches hard against the brick. The boy swings the bottle at Steve’s head but Steve stumbles back and the whole thing smashes into shards against the wall, the blowback cutting up the boy’s hand. He drops it with a swear and opens his cuts up wider on Steve’s face.

Steve gets a sharp fist up under the boy’s ribs and is getting another fist to the face, the boy trying to get a grip on the front of his shirt, when he hears a voice from the end of the alley. “Merlin’s _bollocks_ , Steve, _again?_ ”

And then Bucky’s charging down the alley, too, right at the boy with his hand now clenched in Steve’s collar. Bucky looks almost as mad as the cat.

The boy spins them quick, and Bucky almost trips himself stopping before he runs into Steve head-on.

The boy hauls back to punch Steve again. Bucky looks stricken. He knows he can’t use his magic on a Muggle, and he’s not close enough to get in the way. He looks at Steve like he’s the one about to get pummeled.

Then the kitten falls on the boy’s back with a screech and opens up his shoulders with its claws. He screams louder than the cat. It climbs up the back of his neck, scratching all the way, and sinks its teeth into his ear.

The boy lets go of Steve, flings the cat at the wall, and takes off down the other end of the alley.

After that, it’s quiet. They’ve both been shocked still, trying to process the fact that Steve never actually got hit in the face, at least not the second time.

Steve looks at the cat. It’s padding around the trashcan nosing for food, trailing tiny bloody paw prints behind. He looks over at Bucky.

“How’d you know where I was?” he asks.

“Magic,” Bucky says wryly.

“Oh.”

Bucky just looks at him. “You can’t keep doing this, Steve.”

“What was I supposed to do, let him get stabbed?” He crosses his arms. “Look how tiny he is.”

Bucky raises one eyebrow, and Steve scowls. Just one more thing Buck can do that Steve can’t. “He seemed to do fine on his own.”

“Because I was distracting that bastard,” Steve says, chin tipped like a challenge.

“Your ma’d cuff you if she heard you talking like that,” Bucky says. He’s smirking a little, and Steve lets himself quirk a smile back. Bucky sighs. “Remember what she said about picking your battles?”

“I do pick my battles. I pick all of ‘em.”

Bucky narrows his eyes at him.

“You know, really you’re no better’n me.”

“What do you mean. I only pick fights I can win,” Bucky says, leaning his shoulder up against the wall.

Steve gives him a little grin. “Nah, that’s not true. If you knew how to pick your battles, you would’ve never picked me.”

“Arsehole.” Bucky rolls his eyes.

“Bastard.”

Steve tries to coax the kitten to him with a bit of crust he picks up off the ground, but it jumps up on top of the trashcan and gives him an unimpressed look. “Don’t touch that, it’s filthy,” says Bucky. “See, even the cat won’t touch it, he’s got more sense than you.”

Steve drops the crust and glares at Bucky. “C’mere, kitty,” he says in his sweetest voice, holding out his hand. The cat just looks at him.

“Here, come here,” Bucky says, but Steve pulls his face away when Bucky reaches for it. “Oh, come on, you’ve got magic now. Don’t be a martyr, let me fix your face, it’s all bruised up.”

Steve resists for another minute then acquiesces, letting Bucky grab his chin. He tries to pet the cat, tries to get it to come to him, but it glares at him and goes back to foraging for food.

Steve pouts a little. “Some people,” Bucky tells him pointedly, “just won’t accept help,” and he pinches Steve’s neck when he rolls his eyes. Bucky’s other hand is about half an inch away from Steve’s cheek, and he has this intense look on his face. With that look in his eyes and the way his hand is tense and hovering, it feels almost like he’s trying to touch Steve, to break through some invisible barrier that’s stopping him.

Eventually, Steve’s face stops hurting and Bucky drops his hand. Steve doesn’t say thanks, doesn’t think he can, but he tries to tell Bucky with his eyes.

They start toward home, Bucky walking backwards the way he likes to do, so he and Steve can talk face-to-face. “I named the owl,” Bucky says. He doesn’t say anything else.

“C’mon, don’t leave me in suspense. What’d you call it? Merlin? Salazar? Steve?” Then he smirks. “Did you name it after yourself?”

Bucky ignores that last. “Why would I name it something bloody awful like Steve,” he asks, grinning. Steve kicks a rock at him. “Fine, fine. His name is Ulysses.”

“Ulysses,” Steve says, just to try it out. “I like it.”

“Yeah? Well, he hardly needs your approval, it’s _his_ name. What’re you going to call the cat?”

“The cat? The one in the alley?”

“No, the one right behind you.”

“Ha, ha,” says Steve.

“It’s following us,” says Bucky. Steve scowls at him a little. “No, really, it is. Look behind you.”

Steve does. There’s the cat trailing after them, winding its way along, stalking bugs and biting at the grass as though trying to pretend it isn’t following them and only happened to be heading in the same direction. Steve can see exactly where it’s been, its meandering path, because it still has the boy’s blood on its paws. “Has it been following us this whole time?”

“Yeah, ‘course, Captain Oblivious,” says Bucky.

Steve looks at Bucky with narrowed eyes. “You only just noticed it, didn’t you?”

Bucky grins, hands in his pockets, looking caught-out but unrepentant.

“Captain,” says Steve thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” says Bucky, “the most clueless bloke in the navy.”

“No, Captain. It’s got… gravitas. Dignity.” Steve turns around to walk backwards, too. “What do you think, Captain?” he asks the cat. It pounces on an insect, lunging down to bite at it, and gets a bit of greasy wax wrapper stuck to its nose.

“ _Dignity_ ,” says Bucky, snickering. “You two deserve each other.”

Steve turns back around, and manages to do it without stumbling over his own feet. He gives Bucky his most haughty look, chin up in the air, shoulders as straight as he can get them with his crooked back. Bucky laughs. Steve trails Bucky, the cat trails him, and its bloody tracks trail them all the way home.


End file.
